Archive for the ‘Ukulele 101’ Category

Power chords are about the simplest chords to play – so simple the experts don’t really consider them chords at all. They’re made up of just two notes: the root and the fifth (which is why you’ll often see them referred to as C5, D5 etc). You can find the fifth of any note by […]

The Blues Scale is very similar to the minor pentatonic scale. There’s only one new note: the flattened fifth (also known as the devil’s interval). C Blues Scale The extra note fits in to the minor pentatonic like this: Looks like this in tab: And sounds like this: C Blues Scale Here’s me having a […]

This week, I thought I’d go over the easiest scale around. It only has five notes in – as the ancient Romans amongst you will have already worked out. It’s also used almost exclusively in blues and rock music. C Minor Pentatonic The C minor pentatonic looks like this on the fretboard: This in tab: […]

When I did my ukulele scales posts there were a few people who didn’t have a clue what it was all about. So, I thought I’d go back to basics and cover it from there. The most common scale in all music is the major scale. You’ll hear it all over the place (pretty much […]

Unlike the major scale, there are a whole bunch of minor scales. For this post, I’m going to stick with the natural minor scale. The big advantage is that if you know your major scales on the ukulele, you don’t have to learn anything new. The notes in the A minor scale are exactly the […]

With all the stuff on the net about the ukulele, there’s very little about how to play scales on the ukulele. It’s a bit strange as scales are the building blocks of music in general and chords in particular. I wrote an ebook about how ukulele chords are made up, so I won’t go into […]

Almost all the ukulele tuning notes online seem to be for standard tuning. So I thought I’d knock together tuning notes for some more out of the way tunings. Re-entrant C-tuning g,C,E,A Sometimes referred to as standard tuning. It’s the most common ukulele tuning. Re-entrant D-tuning a,D,F#,B Used to be more popular than it is […]

I’ve been bashing away at this blog for 11 months now. In that time I’ve amassed around 350 posts. That’s way too many for people to sift through, so here’s a quick list of my most popular posts (and after that some posts for people who are new to the uke as well as to […]

A couple of weeks ago Mike asked me for one or two tips for ukulele beginners. My brain went whiring into action (actually, is was more a nasty screetching and cracking of gears). I ended up with a big list of stuff. So here, in their original, un-rewritten and bloated form, are all of them. […]

There are a few variations in how chord charts are shown. But, since they’re a fairly intuitive picture of what to do, it’s not hard to work out. The Dots The type of chord chart I use shows the ukulele fretboard as if it’s pointing upwards and facing towards you. The strings are the vertical […]